JOHN SMART
FORESIGHT SPEAKER, CONSULTANT, AUTHOR
John Smart is a global futurist, foresight consultant, and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Foresight University (Ann Arbor, MI and Los Gatos, CA), a foresight training consultancy. He is also founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit focused on understanding and describing human adaptiveness in a world of accelerating technological change.
John’s expertise is in foresight development. His mission is to help leaders, entrepreneurs, and teams to develop best-in-class foresight process, master the Eight Skills of Foresight and Action, and achieve more adaptive futures for themselves, their teams, and their organizations.
For a list of these and other key foresight books, see The Foresight Guide, 2016.
Good futurists (foresight speakers) present important and potentially relevant ideas, trends, data, and questions about the changing competitive environment to your stakeholders, in a way that entertains, inspires, and generates robust discussion and better strategy, plans, and actions. I’ve been a full-time futurist since 2000, and have delivered keynotes to hundreds of satisfied audiences.
Good foresighters (foresight professionals and consultants) will help your team improve their own strategic discussions about the future, help elicit and map diverse and relevant expert and group opinions, help you uncover implicit assumptions and key disagreements, find better data, models, drivers, trends, constraints, and weak signals to reduce uncertainty, and generate improved forecasts, scenarios, real options, and plans. They help you identify, benchmark and strengthen your current foresight process and culture, so that every stakeholder can get better at anticipating, creating, and managing positive change. I’ve developed undergrad and graduate courses in foresight, and I consult in foresight process and culture for dozens of leaders and their organizations.
Futurists and foresighters may not know more than you about the long-term future, especially in your subspecialty. But the better ones are constantly learning, teaching, and consulting about global and industry trends, innovations, and strategic responses to change, and can help you and your team see and adapt ahead of your competitors. In a world of accelerating technological change, good foresight process and culture are incredibly valuable to every leader and organization. Let me show you how.
John Smart is CEO of Foresight U (Ann Arbor, MI and Los Gatos, CA), a foresight learning and development organization, and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit studying adaptiveness under conditions of accelerating technological change. He is also founder of FERN, the Foresight Education and Research Network, creating curriculum for the 22 MS/PhD programs globally that offer strategic foresight degrees.
Before launching ASF John spent nine years as an educational and software entrepreneur, co-founding and building Hyperlearning, an educational services company sold to The Princeton Review in 1996. He is a lecturer on leadership and technological change at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), an advisor in foresight and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA), and a technical advisor to NextIT (Spokane, WA), a leader in intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) platforms. John has authored several next-gen IT foresight studies, including the Metaverse Roadmap, the Conversational Interface and Open Internet TV. His new book, The Foresight Guide: Being a Leader in Anticipating, Creating and Managing the Future, is free online now and debuts on Amazon in 2018.
As a scholar, John is co-founder of the Evo Devo Universe research community, an international community researching evolutionary and developmental processes of change, and a member of the ECCO research group at VUB (Brussels, Belgium).
John has a BS in business administration from UC Berkeley, an MS in futures studies from the University of Houston, a BS-equivalency in biology from UC San Diego, an MS-equivalency in physiology and medicine (two years of medical school and the USMLE-I) from UC San Diego School of Medicine, and has done postbaccalaureate studies in biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He studied systems theory at UCSD under the mentorship of James Grier Miller (Living Systems, 1978), who mentored under process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Dr. Miller encouraged John to pursue multi-scale studies in technological, economic, and social change from a comparative systems perspective.
John’s twitter account is @johnmsmart. He blogs at Medium on foresight and leadership. His personal blog is Ever Smarter World.
When You’re Ready to Get Serious about the Future
Foresight Speaking & Keynotes
John speaks to the C-suite, to strategy, policy, R&D and HR teams, to university students and the public on a range of industry and organizational foresight topics. He does presentations and runs seminars (Q&A sessions) and workshops (small group breakouts and report backs) on three main themes:
1. Foresight Development
- Universal Foresight (Preparing for Accelerating Change)
- Personal Foresight (Personal Visioning and Strategic Planning)
- Global Foresight (Societal and Sci-Tech Trends and Scenarios)
- Organizational Foresight (Methods and Models)
2. Adaptive Management and Leadership
- The Do Loop: Eight Skills for Adaptive Foresight
- The Five Goals and Ten Values: Adaptive Leadership
- Lessons for Leaders: Profiting from Accelerating Change
- Foresight Culture: Predicting, Creating, and Managing the Future
3. Global Technology Futures
- Natural Intelligence (Deep Learning)
- Natural Security (Societal and Technological Immune Systems)
- Ten Areas of Technology Change
- Personal Sims (Smart Agents, Groupnets, Valuecosm)
- Mediated Reality (AR, VR, Lifelogs, iTV)
Specialty industry and organizational foresight topics are available on request.
What People Say About John

John blogs at Medium on foresight and leadership.
His personal blog is Ever Smarter World. His twitter account is @johnmsmart.
Select posts:
The Truth about Bitcoins and the Blockchain: Part 1—Bitcoins, A Real Future, 2017
The Truth about Bitcoins and the Blockchain: Part 3—Regulatory Needs, and Promising Startups, 2017
Your Personal Sim: Part 2—Why Agents Matter, 2016
Your Personal Sim: Part 1—Your Attention Please, 2016
The Powerful and Intimate Future of Groupnets, 2015
Leadership of Technological Change, 2014
What will Disappear by 2030? An Introduction to Global English, 2013
Leadership Foresight and Security: How We Should Have Won the Vietnam War, 2013
Saving the Titanic: Crowdsourcing to Find Hard Solutions, and Unlearning to Implement Them, 2012
Mankind Rising: Why Evolutionary Developmentalism Will Inherit the Future, 2012
The Race to Inner Space: Our Ever Faster, Smaller, Smarter, Wealthier Future, 2011
Ten Areas of Technological Change, ASF, 2012
The Transcension Hypothesis: A Model for Accelerating Change, Acta Astronautica, 2011
How the Television Will Be Revolutionized: The Future of Internet TV, ASF Study, 2010
The Metaverse Roadmap: Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, AR, Lifelogging, ASF Study, 2007
Driving Toward an Electric Future, ASF, 2006
Measuring Innovation in an Accelerating World, TF&SC, 2005
Human Performance Enhancement in 2032: A Scenario for Military Planners, US Army LTA Brief, 2004
The Conversational Interface: Our Next Great Leap Forward, AccelerationWatch, 2003-2014
Brief History of Intellectual Discussion of Accelerating Change, AccelerationWatch, 1999
The following links will download powerpoint slides or PDFs for select talks:
Intelligence Education in the 2020s, Five Eyes Workshop 2015 (44 slides, PDF)
From Push to Pull: Seven Trends Shaping the Future of Specialty Advertising, ASI Power Summit 2014 (19 slides)
Leadership of Technological Change, MITRE 2013 (75 slides, PDF)
Leadership of Technological Change, WEST 2013 (33 slides)
Global Grand Challenges, Singularity University, 2012 (24 slides)
Adapting to the Future, NPS Navy Senior Leadership Seminar, 2011 (42 slides)
Our Immersive Future: Twelve Developments Worth Fighting For, ImmTech, 2010 (18 slides)
The Digital Self: When Social Media Gets Personal, Dice NextTech 2010 (22 slides)
Foresight Development, Mendoza College of Business, 2009 (69 slides)
For more, see John’s Slides Archive.

Corporate Foresight Consulting

Adaptive Foresight: The Do Loop
Which of these four steps and eight skills are personal strengths? Team strengths? Which need improvement?
Are you measuring and improving each of these skills on your team?
(Feel free to mouse over this graphic for details).
Adaptive Foresight Development (Eight Skills)
Change Management and Leadership
Data Acquisition and Research
Design Thinking and Gamestorming
Digital Competitiveness Assessment
Efficiency Assessment
Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship
Forecasting and Modeling
Foresight Culture and Process
Ideation and Innovation Management
Intelligence, Security and Risk Management
Learning and Development
Metrics and Scorecards
Performance Management
Predictive Analytics
Product and Service Development
Sales and Marketing
Technology Assessment and Scouting
Scenario Planning and Learning
Strategy, Analysis and Planning
U/X and Usability
Wargaming and Simulations
Workplace Strategies and Design
CONTACT
For speaking inquiries and date reservations, feel free to contact John directly. You may also contact John’s agent,

PHONE
John: 650-468-4462 m
Kevin: 760-855-7705 m
EMAIL
John Smart
johnsmart@gmail.com
Kevin Russell
kevinrussell@gmail.com